I must touch briefly now just one other point of practical importance
that we need to guard, in order to be tender and true in our dealings
with our fellow-men. You will find, if you look over the face of
society, that there are two kinds of morality, frequently quite
inconsistent with each other; and sometimes the poorer of the two kinds
is held in higher esteem than the better. I mean there is conventional
morality, and there is real morality.

As a hint of illustration: An American woman goes to Turkey to-day; and
she is shocked by the customs of the women and their style of dress. It
seems to her that no woman can possibly be moral who, although she
covers her head, can appear on the street with feet and ankles bare.
But this same Turkish woman is shocked beyond the possibility of
utterance to know that in Europe and America women carefully cover
their feet, but expose their faces and their shoulders. It seems
terrible to her, and she cannot understand how a European or American
woman can have any regard for the principles of delicacy and morality.

Do you not see how, in both cases here, it is purely a matter of
convention? No real question of morality is touched in either case. I
speak of this to prepare you to note how conscience can be as troubled
over things which are purely conventional as it can over things which
are downright and real. Let me use another illustration, going a little
deeper in the matter. Here is a man, for example, who is terribly
shocked because his neighbor takes a drive with his family on Sunday
afternoon. It seems to him an outrage on all the principles of public
and social morality; and he is eager to get up a society to abolish
such customs, that seem to him to threaten the prosperity of all that
is good in the world. But this same man, perhaps, has been trained in a
way of conducting his business that, while legal, is not strictly fair.
This man may be hard and cruel towards his employees. He may cherish
bitter hatreds towards his rivals. In his heart he may be transgressing
the law of vital ethics, while fighting with all the power of his
nature for that which does not touch any real question of right or
wrong at all.

Or take a woman who, while shocked at the transgression of some social
custom in which she has been trained from her childhood, or, for
example, has come to think that a certain way of observing Lent, on
which we have just entered, is absolutely necessary to the saf